The Hanged God
by ChevalierTialys
Summary: First, Kylo Ren breaks Poe Dameron. After that, Poe Dameron breaks Kylo Ren.
1. First Day

_(This story, like most of my other stories, is backed up on AO3 in case the sexual content gets too much towards the end)._

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On the first day, Poe Dameron awakes in darkness.

His body is an empty vessel, slowly filling up with pain. It coagulates at the base of his spine, in his knee and elbow joints and in his belly - the Stormtroopers' favourite places to throw kicks and punches. His brain floats languidly in a jar of boiling oil. He cannot remember the details of his imprisonment, but he can imagine how it must have happened - the guards with their tasers and truncheons; different versions of the phrase _Resistance scum_ fluttering about the cell like a flock of birds; himself rolling in his own blood, weeping and laughing and screaming by turns.

It's become something of a game for Poe. The thing about games, he thinks, is that they become _boring_.

Gradually, other sensations diffuse out of the pain. Poe can feel steel against his back and around his wrists and ankles. By the slow numbing of the nerves in his feet, he can tell that he is fixed in a semi-upright position. And then white lights explode into his vision, and he curses as his thoughts are once more thrown into disarray.

A shadow detaches itself from the white depths, flowing into a human figure. It is swathed in black, a mask of metal scales and a dark hood covering its features. Steel-tipped boots ring as it crosses the floor, sharp and clear like an illustration of evil in some children's book.

 _My death?_ Poe thinks. The thought is so ridiculous, he has to swallow a laugh.

The figure stops in front of Poe, who stares down at his feet and the contraption of twisted steel that holds them in place. It sinks down onto one knee, and then the other, the motions of its body suddenly awkward as if the skin it wears is somehow new and ill-fitting. This observation gives Poe the courage to move his gaze to where the figure's eyes would have been.

"Do I talk first, or you talk first?" he asks, his voice bubbling hysterically in his throat. The past days have not been kind to his nerves, after all. "I talk first?"

The mask twitches to the side; Poe is reminded of a creature cocking its head and sniffing.

" _Can_ you talk? Are you alive under there?"

"Where is the map?"

Apart from it most likely being male, Poe cannot hope to imagine the face behind that distorted voice.

"What map?" he asks. "I had a few maps in my X-Wing. If you wanted one, you should've left it in a better condition."

"You know which map." This is what a flat line on a heart monitor must sound like, Poe decides.

"And if I don't? What will you do then, I wonder? Is 'take off your mask and join me for a beer' too optimistic?"

"Do you not know who I am? What I could do to you?"

"Someone from the Dark Side, I presume." Poe decides to play stupid. This is a new game at least, and there are certainly worse ones to play. "And you could, uh, kill me I suppose?"

Heat licks Poe's feet; sweat drips stinging into his eyes. He stares in wonder as the man kneeling before him burns with invisible flames, his darkness growing brighter and brighter until it seems to drag every last photon of light into itself. He rises, reaching a slender gloved hand towards his captive's face.

"Foolish little pilot. I _am_ the Dark Side."

A flick of his wrist smears Poe's reply like chalk across a blackboard.


	2. Second Day

On the second day, Poe Dameron begs for the Stormtroopers and their boots.

He whimpers as they enter his cell, but when the one they call Kylo Ren steps out from behind their ranks, he begins to scream. He screams and screams as the guards stun-cuff him, pouring forth a constant stream of confessions from between the splinters of his teeth, stitching together every prayer to every deity he has ever heard of.

He had thought that the guards had taught him the meaning of pain, but how wrong, how ignorant he had been! A day of screaming and pleading and confessing in the steel chair, not knowing where the pain came from, knowing only how terrible it was as it attacked from everywhere and nowhere, has taught him otherwise. And the hands; the hands of Kylo Ren inside him, swimming through his pounding blood to tear at the very fibres of his muscles, creeping along every nerve to take apart the grey matter of his brain. Poe had become a rat on a dissecting table, watching with cold dead eyes as all his secrets were torn out of him and examined under a blinding light.

The map and the droid had been the first to go. After that, he had offered numbers and names and base locations to Ren. When the Stormtroopers had dragged him off the chair and back to his cell, he had wept loudly, knowing that he would die and praying that his knowledge would be true.

Yet it had only been sleep, and Poe Dameron had awoken with the knowledge of what he had done and what he had become: a bloody skin, enclosing nothing.

"You have no way of understanding what is happening to you," Ren explains as Poe trembles in his steel cradle. "All that you know is that while you are in this room, I am capable of causing you the worst pain that a living creature can possibly experience. That is how it should be. This pain is no human act, but an act of the Force."

"This is enough." Poe tries to keep his voice even. "You can execute me. I've told you everything that I know. There's no-one left whom I haven't betrayed to you. I'm not afraid of death anymore, please just stop this, _please..._ "

Poe's words are drowned in an endless torrent of pain. Acid runs through his nervous system, scorching him, obliterating what's left of his sanity like a cockroach in a nuclear blast. Ren's geometric form swims in front of his vision, an anchor in a sea of destruction.

"For some," Ren continues as Poe curses himself and the universe that created him, "witnessing the power of the Force is enough. You are not such a man. Those who are quickest to believe, are the quickest to heal."

"Why are you doing this?" Poe breathes. "You could make a statement of my death. Send a Holovid to the Resistance. Force knows how many times I've betrayed them. Why are you keeping me alive?"

"Because your belief is misplaced, and I wish to show you the truth."

Poe laughs. His entire body shakes with the broken sound, and when it's over, all the strength seems to leave him. He hangs from the chair like a split cocoon for something that might once have been good and beautiful.

"Oh, you want to _convert_ me? Show me the Dark Side? No, I'm afraid there are things not even you can take from me."

Ren's laugh sounds like the dying of a star.

 _Rain, sticky warm like blood_. Poe's eyes snap open, every muscle straining. _A golden bird lies in the grass, its throat torn out by a Sintaril._ He tries to struggle; tears prick his eyes. _The sky is bright with diamonds. Mommy, did that bird's soul go up there?_

"No," he gasps. "You can't have my memories." Laughter in his head; that same animal-like tilting of the mask. _One day, Poe, you'll see what's up there for yourself. One day I'll take you to the stars._

"Get out." _Sweat-slick hands and hair; that medcentre smell._ "Get out of my fucking head!" _Son, I love you more than anything, promise me you'll carry my soul to the stars!_ And Poe shakes and screams, ready to tear himself apart; destroy every atom of himself if it means erasing the tracks left on these deepest and most precious parts of his being.

"Get out of my fucking head, you piece of shit!" Kylo Ren is saying something again, offering yet another fable about pain, and his words bump stupidly against Poe's ears like the midges on the planet where his mother lies buried. "I'll never give in to you, get out, get out, _GET OUT_!"

When the Stormtroopers drag him back to his cell, he keeps his eyes fixed on the place where Ren's coat ends and his mask begins. The stun cuffs click open and he launches himself at his tormentor. His hands flail as he seeks out Ren's carotid artery, his mind dim with fantasies of a hot red spurt against his skin.

There's a moment when his fingertips clink against steel and then he's being flung across the room, his guards leaping onto him as soon as he crumples to the floor. Something black lies in his field of vision. It takes him a while to recognise it as the mask.

Kylo Ren blinks down at him, lost, dragged out of his own darkness into the blinding light. The first thought that crosses Poe's mind is just how pale and fragile and _young_ he looks. The second is how his lips part and his nostrils flare as he pants. A boot presses into Poe's back as he stares at Ren's white neck, thinking about how easy it would be to wrap his hands around it and squeeze that leaping blue pulse into stillness. There's a look in Ren's dark eyes that may or may not be fear.

The air crackles around him as he sweeps up his mask and flees.


	3. Third Day

On the third day, Kylo Ren is masked and vicious once more.

"You must learn doubt," he says as he paces back and forth across Poe's vision. "You must embrace self-destruction. You must sacrifice yourself, and allow yourself to be reborn in the image of the Force."

Poe stares at the mask, painting the face he had seen over it. The fearful eyes; the lips that might have trembled, though he doubts it. Cornered; stripped; voiceless as an animal. Powerless. Useless...

Ren turns to face him. The image is shattered by a blaster bold made of pain. There are fingers in Poe's mind, burrowing through him like hungry worms.

 _Stars close enough to touch._ Poe grits his teeth; thinks of Ren's eyes, Ren's fear. _The exhilaration of entering hyperspace for the first time, laughter ringing out amidst ribbons of light._ There's laughter in his head, but it's not his own.

"You're afraid," Poe gasps, forcing the steel-scented air into his aching lungs. "Your whole body stinks of it. I saw it on your face- _argh!_ "

 _Every flight had been for her._ Poe screams as invisible fire surges through him, burning away everything but the memories that Ren has decided to toy with, scorching Poe's nerves into frazzled split ends. _I must fly for myself now._ This is wrong; this decision belongs to _him,_ not even him and his mother but him alone. _Comforting weight of helmet, boots pressed firmly into the soil of a strange new world. A hand clad in leather shaking a small soft one._ Poe sags against his restraints, wondering how the hell he's meant to survive now that everything that's kept him alive smells of Kylo Ren.

A tear slithers down his cheek. He fixes his eyes beyond the mask, imagining what expression Ren's face would take on as he fired a blaster at it. How white skin and dark curls would look splattered in swatches of red across the wall.

"I am not afraid," Ren snarls. "I have righteousness on my side. It is you who must fear me!"

Poe thinks of Ren's eyes, the color of stimcaf with just a drop of milk the way he likes it on long-haul flights. He wonders what colours would blossom from them if he splashed them with acid. Imagines Ren on his knees, screaming and shaking and weeping as blood diluted by tears gushes down his ruined face.

"It must be hard for you," he whispers. "All this power at your disposal when you've got the brain of a spoilt child."

"Insult me all you want, Poe Dameron." He can hear the sneer in that mechanical voice. "It does not change the fact that you have nothing left but me and the Dark."

 _The hand belongs to General Leia Organa, and her eyes crinkle as she smiles. Here, at last, is something to fly for._

 _You betrayed her,_ says the voice in his head, and this time he can't tell which of them it belongs to. _She gave you all the trust and kindness she had left, and you gave it away like it was nothing._

Poe locks his eyes with the mask. He imagines his gaze sprouting claws, forcing its way inside and tearing that face into shreds.

"See? This is exactly what you don't understand. You're right, your Dark Side and your Order are all I have left. But I _hate_ you, Kylo Ren. I hate you like I never imagined I could ever hate, and that hatred is what has kept me from losing myself. You talk to me about faith when you're the only obstacle in mine. If killing you meant destroying the universe, then by the Force, I'd do it!"

Hands around his throat, even though Ren's are balled into fists at his sides. _Leia Organa, the beauty of legends made small and plain by mourning._ The horror of what he's done to her rises in Poe's chest as a sob, only to be denied release by the mind of the man he sold her to. _So tired, shot through with the loss of a husband – and a child?_ Darkness rises in the corners of Poe's eyes, and he greets it like an old friend. _Copper hair winds around Leia's face, crowning her in light like a Diathim. Her hands are soft, her smile enough to send men to their deaths even after all these years_. _She turns, brows furrowed in confusion, towards a masked shadow. A flash of red; Leia Organa sprawled in the dirt, mouth open in a silent scream..._

" _N-no..._ " The darkness recedes, giving way to light as sweet air fills Poe's chest. "No! I won't let you get to her! I'll crush you with my bare hands if I have to! I _love_ her, you filth, and I'll die knowing I had something you never will!"

Ren snarls, a dragon beaten back by a child with a stick.

Sick, beautiful fantasies flash before Poe's eyes. _Kylo Ren, tied naked to a stake and used as target practice. The young recruits aren't good at hitting vital areas, so he screams for it to end._ The fingers in his mind are back, but this time he's ready. _Kylo Ren flogged to death with his own soldiers' truncheons. A Stormtrooper takes a fistful of blood-caked hair, and severs his head with a flash of lightsaber red._ Ren is a panicked presence in Poe's head, a bird trapped in a cage of glass. _Kylo Ren with his robes around his waist, fingers leaving red streaks on the floor as his prisoner uses his body, laughing as he paints soft white flesh with bruises..._

Something inside Poe shatters, and for the first time in three days, he's _free._ Shivers wrack Ren's body as he sinks to his knees.

"Good," says Poe with a smile. "Now we can finally have a conversation."

"You are more powerful than you realize, Dameron." Ren's voice trembles even through the synthesizer, although Poe has to admire the tenacity which lets him sweeten his words even at a moment like this. "I see that your conversion is almost complete. You may ask me one question, and I will answer truthfully."

 _A question?_ Poe prepares himself. For three days he has courted Kylo Ren in a wild jungle spin filled with fire and drums and noise. Now it is time for the waltz.

"Take off your mask. I want to see the truth on your face when you answer."

He can see Ren warring with himself; trying to decide whether honor really is worth it after all. And then he obeys, cradling the mask gently in gloved hands. His skin has traded its pallor for a flushed pink. A dark curl lies pressed against his sweat-slick forehead.

"All right, here's my question. Do you have a wife? Children?"

Ren's scowl is evidence that this is the very last thing he had expected, and Poe rejoices.

"A poorly chosen and irrelevant question. However, if you must know, the Knights of Ren are required to take a vow of chastity. Does that satisfy you?"

 _Now which mythical order does this remind me of?_ Poe has to stifle a laugh. He wishes he could change his posture, maybe prop up his chin with a hand to seem stupid and irreverent.

"Are your Knights of Ren anything like the Jedi in all those holovids I watched as a teen? Somehow, they always seemed to find loopholes in their vows. It led to some interesting results. Have you ever found a loophole?" He waits for an answer. Kylo Ren gives none. "Never? Surely you've had your share of timid fumblings in a back alley? Surely you've kissed a girl you thought was as pure and righteous as yourself? No? A boy, then? Or maybe a grey-haired officer, whose hand was slippery as an eel as you tried so very hard to convince him that you weren't just another nothing? That maybe, if you made him feel good enough, he'd believe that someday you could be Darth Vader?"

Ren chokes him with his hands this time. Poe bears with it, recognizing it as the growling of a defanged beast. To kill him would be to admit failure, after all.

"Do you get off on this?" Poe asks him afterwards as he shakes and grits his teeth and puts on such an admirable show of self-control. "Does this make you feel good?"

"My duty is only to teach and heal, traitor."

"Then you're wrong," Poe whispers. "You cannot imagine just how wrong you are."


	4. Fourth Day

On the fourth day, Kylo Ren seems eager to continue the dance.

"You consider me evil," he says as Poe watches from his steel chair. "You think that my objective is to bring you pain for the sake of pain. To destroy you for the sake of destruction. That is not true. I only destroy you to the extent to which I destroy myself, and no further."

"Should I be honoured?" Poe asks glibly.

"Faith and self-destruction go hand in hand," Ren continues, ignoring his captive. "Is there anything as destructive as martyrdom, or even a vow of chastity, from the evolutionary point of view? To have faith, we must destroy ourselves. The further we are willing to tear ourselves apart, the closer we are to the blank slates with which we are born. No desires, no hope, no vice and no virtue. Only then may the Force shape us into our truthful images. That is why I have chosen to destroy you – to heal you, so that you may serve beside me one day. Watch me now."

Ren pushes his hood back, revealing the entire ugly bulk of his helmet. Dark fingers find hidden fasteners, and his cloak slides down his shoulders to pool on the floor. Poe stares, half expecting Ren to draw some hidden instrument of torture from his robes, surprised for the first time in heaven knows how long while a small cynical part of him wonders just how long Ren had spent rehearsing for this show.

The tug of another's mind on his own never comes. Instead, Ren's hands linger at his breast and on the sash around his waist. And then he's stepping out of his robes, his motions fluid and unashamed as if he were undressing for a bath. He stands defiant before Poe, leather-wrapped limbs neatly at his sides, his white heaving breast stark against the puddle of darkness at his feet.

"Do you see now?" The slit in his helmet is level with Poe's eyes; there is something in his voice that hadn't been there yesterday. "Do you see the power I have to offer?"

Unbidden, a gasp rises to Poe's lips. Ren's skin is deathly pale, and every breath he takes sends shadows from honed muscles dancing across it. But what holds Poe's gaze is the steel lattice fastened around his waist. It covers him in shimmering fish scales from his lowest ribs to his hipbones. Beneath it, the skin is dappled with blue and purple and sick raw red.

"You seem terribly shocked." Ren turns as if admiring himself before a mirror. "The cilice is an ancient instrument. Almost as old as the moment when we turned away from our worship of pleasure to face the truth of the Universe. I wear this one for two hours every cycle. When I stop bleeding, I pull it tighter. Do I scream? Do I beg for mercy?"

Poe realises that some of the shadows slithering across Ren's skin are old whip weals, grey and ugly.

"I suppose it gives you power, doesn't it?" Poe wonders out loud. "Of course my understanding is limited, but I've been told that the Dark Side of the Force draws power from pain and suffering. Am I right?"

"Yes, but not in the way that you think. What you call suffering, I call enlightenment. After all, can you name a single human achievement not driven by—"

"Oh, spare me the scripted lines." However nonchalant he tries to sound, Poe's eyes refuse to leave Ren's skin. He traces Ren's muscles with his gaze, lingering on the pattern of white scars and dark freckles, wondering who else he's taken those robes off for; who else has seen him strut and preen and use phrases too big for his sweet red mouth. The same violent lust he felt the day before stabs him in the gut.

The air crackles, and Poe knows that Ren has felt it too.

"You know, Kylo Ren," he continues, "You've certainly succeeded in one thing. I never thought I'd say it, but today I actually found you _interesting._ "

"How wonderful." Ren bends down to pick up his clothes. "My I ask what led to this development?"

"Oh no, you don't have to bother putting all of that back on." Poe can't help but chuckle as he wonders when exactly his own attitude began to rub off on his captor. "You see, I'm interested in the _real_ you. Not the 'you' you wear on top of all that metal and leather and big bad evil."

Ren pulls his mask over his head, his movements now brisk and frustrated.

" _This_ ," he jabs a gloved finger at himself, "is not the real me. And _that_ is not the real you. We are products of the Force, bound by our stupid desire to retain a sense of self. One day, our sense of self will vanish like dust on the wind. But the Force will remain. How do you still fail to understand?"

"Now that's a bit of a problem, isn't it? We're stuck here together for Lord knows how long, and neither of us understands the other as much as they'd like. So why don't we play some good old-fashioned party games?" Poe lowers his voice, the corners of his mouth twitching. " _Truth, dare, or command?"_

"This is idiotic." Ren's half-naked and bloody state only makes his grimace more ridiculous.

"Come now, be a sport! It's not even a difficult choice. I wouldn't presume to give you commands on your own ship, and if I dared you to do something really embarrassing, I wouldn't be able to check if you actually did it or not, would I? So that leaves us with truth." Poe smirks as his eyes meet Ren's narrowed ones. "Tell me, who do you wear that thing for?"

"For myself," Ren answers, his fingertips twitching in a way that suggests he has no idea what to do with them.

"But that's not true. We all need someone to suffer for, don't we?"

"For Darth Vader," he spits. "Does that satisfy you?"

He turns on his heel and begins to pace like a cornered beast, dark curls swinging into his eyes.

"Oh, I get it! You want to suffer like he suffered! You really love him, don't you?"

"I don't _love_ him." Hands clench into fists; a lighting strip sizzles and darkens. "I admire him for what he achieved! What would you know about admiration? All you care about are your own stupid, selfish desires!"

"Oh, I understand." Ren's discomfort brushes Poe's mind, transforming into excitement along the way. "It can't be easy to love a legend. So who do you love, Kylo Ren? Who's the one that makes you feel something in that cold belly of yours? Is it that commander we talked about yesterday?"

The noise that escapes through Ren's gritted teeth is somewhere between a growl and a scream. He pounces; Poe barely has time to brace for the impact before Ren's hands are around his throat. Their bodies are almost touching, he realizes. Heat rolls in waves off the knight's skin; Poe distracts himself from the desperate need to breathe by wondering how much higher Ren's core body temperature is than his own. Touching him when he's like this would surely make an ordinary human's fingers blister.

"Why are you doing this?" Ren shouts, his breath hot with a faint metallic smell. "Why do you ask all these—these _things_ of me? You should be afraid, I could crush you and everything you've ever cared about, so why am I the one who has to watch myself?" Poe's vision dims with each shudder of his heart, but the flecks of saliva landing on his cheek keep him grounded. "All these twisted things in your head, these things you want to do to me... _why? Why aren't you afraid, damn you?"_

Ren releases his grip, panting, sweat shining on his skin. A drop of blood detaches itself from a steel hook, leaving a winding red trail as it slips down the curve of his hipbone.

That drop of blood is what convinces Poe to risk it all.

"Because you're beautiful, and I want you. Because I want you to come to me with all your secrets, Kylo Ren. I want to know how many hands have touched you, and whose name you whisper when you play with yourself." He laughs, feeling sick and drained. "Because the only reason you showed me the cilice is that you're enjoying yourself so damn much."

Kylo Ren fights him this time. His fists, his boots and the hilt of his lightsaber rain down on him like so many pinpricks while he laughs and laughs.


End file.
